Martlet 2018

Martlet Newsletter of Pembroke College Cambridge Issue 22 Spring 2018

Doing Ourselves Proud The Master, Lord Smith of Finsbury

Contents 3 When You Walk Through the Storm...

4 When the Worm Turns 5 Border Crossings with Colonial Baggage 6 Back to the Future 7 The Research Fellowship in Italian Studies 8 Pembroke Choir’s Tour to Zambia 9 Is There a Role for Students in International Development?

10 Forty Years of International Programmes at Pembroke College 11 The ‘Productivity Paradox’: Are We Too Busy To Get Anything Done?

12 Only Connect...

13 Gossip 15 Poet’s Corner Published by Pembroke College Cambridge CB2 1RF Telephone 01223 338100 Email: martlet@pem.cam.ac.uk Editor Alex Houen Gossip Editor Colin Wilcockson Illustrations Martin Rowson © Pembroke College 2018 Photography and illustrations copyright of the owners Design cambridgesesignstudio.org Print Langham Press

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t’s now over a year on from the wonderful launch event for our campaign, The Time and the Place, to raise funds for our Mill Lane development, and since then we have been working hard – Fellows, students and architects – on all the detailed planning for what we are hoping to create.

Some of the buildings, of course, have to be kept and refurbished; some have newer extensions that we will be able to remove; and some, especially at the west end of the site, can be demolished altogether. Our aim is to create two new courtyards, a smaller and more intimate paved courtyard with gardens as you enter the new site from Trumpington Street, and a larger newly-built courtyard towards the back.

And as well as being able to provide around 100 new student rooms, mainly for postgraduate students where the need is greatest, but also for some undergraduates, we will be able to achieve a dramatic improvement in the facilities we can offer our students as well.

We want to achieve the very best quality of teaching and seminar spaces, enabling us to use modern interactive educational opportunities to the full. We want to create space where visiting scholars, academics, school teachers and others can come and find a base. We want to create a ‘wellness’ centre where our students can come to lose the everyday stress that they often experience. We want to create spaces for sports training, for music, for screening, and for quiet study. We will have a gallery space to host displays of our treasures, or of art and books, and which will also be able to host outside exhibitions. And perhaps most exciting of all, the acquisition of the United Reform Church with its imposing tower, immediately opposite the gable end of our Christopher Wren Chapel, will give us the space for the first time in our history to have a proper auditorium – with capacity to seat over 200 people – for lectures, talks, and music performances.

Unsurprisingly, the shepherding-forward of our plans for Mill Lane has entailed frequent meetings, much discussion amongst us all, and a lot of hard work by our wonderful architects, Haworth Tompkins. But while all of this has been absorbing lots of energy and commitment, the day-to-day life of the College has been full of vibrant activity. As well as all the hard academic work (we’re determined to sustain our recent record of consistent academic success) there’s a lot more going on, too. At the Matriculation Dinner each year I always tell our incoming students that, yes, they are here to work hard, but they are here to enjoy all the other things in life as well.

So I’m really proud that under the guidance of our Director of Music, Anna Lapwood, the Choir has been going from strength to strength, undertaking a summer tour in Zambia (see Anna’s article about it on p. X), brilliantly enhancing our regular Sunday Evensong, taking part in a range of concerts in Cambridge, and providing musical accompaniment to our ‘Pembroke Soirees’ for alumni in London. I’m proud that our students have continued through the year to raise funds for the Jo Cox Studentship that we have established in tribute to Jo, for a PhD student in migration and refugee studies; and I’m delighted that the first Studentship will go, from October, to Matt Mahmoudi, who is researching into the role of civil society in migrant integration (see his article on his work in last year’s Martlet). I’m proud that both the Men’s and Women’s first boats succeeded in bumping up on the final day of the

Lents, when the races were able to be run at last after several days of cancellation because of the snow and ice.

And I’m proud, too, that Pembroke Players continue to be the most active and productive dramatic society in the whole of Cambridge.

The recent sad news of the death of the great comedian and performer Ken Dodd reminded me of the wonderful afternoon, nearly two years ago, when both Sir Ian McKellen and (soon to be knighted) Ken Dodd came to visit me at the Master’s Lodge. I had invited a group of students from Pembroke Players to come for tea, and on a sunny afternoon in the garden this group listened spellbound whilst 78-year-old Gandalf and 88-year-old Ken Dodd gave them a masterclass in how to hold an audience, how to tell a joke, how to pace a performance. I think it’s been one of my favourite memories from the whole of the last few years.

We’ve had a range of fascinating speakers during recent months, too, providing insight and the fruits of experience to both students and Fellows. Lord David Puttnam talked about how modern forms of communication can intrude on privacy and distort truth. Sir David Adjaye spoke about his career as an architect, and the creation of the National Museum of African American History in Washington.

Hilary Benn, Chair of the Brexit Select Committee in the House of Commons, came to speak about the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the Brexit process. And Baroness Valerie Amos, former United Nations Deputy SecretaryGeneral for Humanitarian Relief, gave our first Jo Cox Memorial Lecture on how we can build on Jo’s legacy to face the challenges of an increasingly uncertain world.

After all, facing the challenges of an uncertain world is what, at heart, a Pembroke education must try to prepare our students for. We are determined to carry on doing so, the best we possibly can.

Portrait of the Master by John Glover (2017)

When You Walk Through the Storm...

Matthew Mellor, Development Director

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hope you’re reading this in the glow of late spring / early summer sunshine and reflecting on what is, despite the Tripos, one of the headiest and most delightful periods of the year. As I write, however, it is -2 degrees centigrade and spring has not yet sprung because it’s been thwarted by not one but two ‘beasts from the east’! It is my sense of gathering storms that prompts me to reflect on the days and years to come.

These ‘storms’ come in the form of competition. My colleagues and I feel it very strongly: it threatens, closes in, nags, prompts, and yet it also inspires. At Pembroke, we are in a great place to face competition; not only have we ridden out a fair few storms in the past 670 years, but we are buoyed by the confidence that we have Pembroke alumni and other supporters as friends.

In my nearly twenty-five year association with this great place, I cannot recall a time when that friendship might have been more important.

For instance, we have the challenges of the seemingly ever-changing Higher Education environment in the UK. That mutability has a particularly palpable effect on our ability to meet the increasing financial needs of students from a wide range of household incomes who find the likely prospect of a £50,000-plus personal debt upon graduation understandably daunting. Such pressure sometimes plays a role in another modern challenge for our students: impaired mental health, diagnosed or undiagnosed, affects not just individual students but their friends and families too. The NHS struggles to cope, so there is a growing need for the College and the University, through the Counselling Service and extraordinary contributions from our own academic and non-academic staff, to step up (see the articles on this matter in the 2016 Martlet).

Cambridge, its reputation and its capacity to continue to lead the world with extraordinary research, are facing increasing challenges too. After Brexit, how feasible will it be to maintain the international funding and partnerships that have enabled so much great work to be achieved in this University and brought great researchers and teachers to Pembroke over recent decades? The people I so enjoy working with in

this College were attracted by the intellectual and scientific possibilities that this great University offered, by the chance to work in a centre of excellence with established and exciting new figures in their field. With these partnerships under a cloud of doubt, and now academic pensions at risk of significant devaluation, will we face a ‘brain drain’?

Central to this academic competition are graduate students. When I first arrived at Pembroke in 1994, I believe there were around ninety people crammed into the limited facilities afforded by what is now known as the Outer Parlour on J staircase. It teemed with bright, engaged people then, and in its current home on the bottom floor of M staircase it continues to do so. It is a community that is vital to the life of Pembroke and to the wider University, bringing the graduates’ immense talent to bear on the a huge array of current questions, big and esoteric. Students know that employers are increasingly looking for employees with a postgraduate qualification, so graduate study is presently about far more than preparing the next generation of academics. Consequently, numbers of graduates at Pembroke and elsewhere have grown considerably, and competition for the best is global. While the academic and other experiential opportunities offered by Cambridge are very important, more fully-funded studentships (fees plus subsistence) are needed in the University to draw in a range of the best applicants.

Mill Lane and particularly the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Court, will be a vital element in Pembroke’s attraction to such applicants. Not only will it create better and nearer accommodation for a large number of graduate and some undergraduate students, the facilities in that court and the rest of the site will be an enduring source of inspiration.

There will be facilities for teaching, learning, exploring new technologies, sharing cross-disciplinary research, entertainment, good mental and physical health, partnerships with our friends in the world of business and public life, and inspiration for applicants from whatever financial background or circumstance.

The Time and the Place campaign needs your support as friends and benefactors. It is an understatement to say that this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform everything about the College, to move confidently forward along the path that we have all (Pembroke Members, staff, Fellows and current students) been striding along together.

Thank you to all those who have contributed or committed to doing so, whether with a gift or with the many other forms of support (for instance, volunteering, such as our excellent Campaign Board does, or providing advice on our finances or other aspects of College life) that have meant so much to your college.

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When the Worm Turns Nick Burton on his research in genetics and adaptive traits

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hen I closed my eyes, I could see the small, linear silhouettes squiggling across the back of my eyelids. It was a clear sign that I had spent too many hours peering through the microscope, but I couldn’t stop my hunt, for fear that the rare mutant animal out of millions might elude me. I was an undergraduate student in my senior year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying microscopic roundworms as a research assistant.

These particular roundworms, C. elegans, have the ability to transmit information about their environment from parent to progeny independently of changes to their DNA sequence. To determine how such a phenomenon could occur I was searching for potential mutants that were unable to convey DNA-independent information to their offspring. In other words, I was staring through a ’scope at petri dishes for hours on end, for days in a row and I was loving it.

It was around this time that I knew I had to pursue a career in genetics. Not because genetic approaches are the only avenue to answering fundamental questions about biology (they’re not) or because doctoral research pays particularly well (it doesn’t) but because I found myself unable to stop working. My research at Wisconsin was an adventure, a metaphorical quest for a holy grail that might answer some fundamental question in biology, and it all took place in a ten-centimetre-wide space at the base of my microscope. Perhaps it was a question that only a handful of people in the world would ever truly care about: how do roundworms pass epigenetic (i.e., DNA-independent) information from parents to offspring? But it was my question, and as long as the answer remained unknown, the potential for a major discovery remained alluring enough to pursue in a quest-like fashion: with little hope for success and a lot of ’scope-induced headaches along the way.

I left Wisconsin to move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a PhD student in one of the preeminent labs in the relatively niche field of hunting for mutant roundworms. At MIT I began working with new methods of manipulating worms, specifically examining how worms respond to being exposed to sea water. I found that sea water was toxic to these animals due to too much salt (an effect more formally called osmotic stress).

However, if the worms’ parents were exposed to mild stress, that experience could protect their offspring from the future toxic effects of sea water. I discovered that this parent-tooffspring adaptation was mediated by changes in insulinlike signalling in the mother. This was particularly exciting, as changes in insulin

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signalling in humans underlie or contribute to many common pathologies, such as type 2 diabetes. Our results suggested that changes in a mother’s insulin signalling could ‘program’ changes to her children’s development and physiology. They could potentially even program adaptations in her children that allow them to better cope with the environment into which they are about to be born.

Since I first began investigating how a mother’s exposure to stress can protect her offspring from future stress in worms, several other groups have described similar observations in organisms throughout the animal kingdom.

One of my favourite examples was when researchers made observations related to the inheritance of anti-predator behaviours in crickets. These researchers found that exposure to wolf spiders was stressful to female crickets, for perhaps obvious reasons. Surprisingly, the stress of surviving an encounter with a wolf spider resulted in mothers that by some as-yet unknown molecular mechanism were able to ‘forewarn’ their unborn offspring about the presence of wolf spiders. These ‘forewarned’ offspring, unlike their non-forewarned peers, became more immobile upon hatching, a behaviour which enhanced their survival in the presence of predators. These results suggest that fear itself – or behaviours that, in humans, would almost certainly be motivated by fear – might be passed from mothers to offspring. In another example, it was observed that large increases in the population of red squirrels in the Yukon forests of Canada are stressful to pregnant squirrels because increases in squirrel density make it less likely that their own children will survive. This stress causes mothers to ‘program’ changes into their children’s development; children of stressed mother squirrels subsequently grow faster, making them more likely to acquire territory. This territory acquisition enabled by faster growth enhances the squirrels’ survival in a resourcelimited environment.

As a student, I was taught that the appearance of new or different traits between one generation and the next is governed by changes in DNA sequence. As a researcher now at Cambridge, I seek to challenge this closely-held doctrine by discovering a mechanism for the DNAindependent inheritance of adaptive traits. As an adventurer, I am excited to continue my hunt for mutant worms under my microscope and I look forward to many more afternoons staring at squiggly lines behind my eyelids.

Dr Nick Burton joined Pembroke as a supernumerary Fellow in July 2017 and is a Next Generation Research Fellow at the Centre for Trophoblast Research within the Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience.

Border Crossings with Colonial Baggage Nicki Kindersley on histories of the South Sudan and Uganda borderlands

L Dr Nicki Kindersley is the new Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow at Pembroke, and specialises in the history and politics of the Sudans and their borderlands. She completed her PhD at Durham University on subversive political organisation within displaced South Sudanese communities in Khartoum during the 1960s2005 civil wars, working mainly on the South Sudan-Darfur borderlands. She continues to visit South Sudan, Uganda, and Sudan for research work on the book project from this thesis. In collaboration with South Sudanese academics she also runs several policy-focused projects for the UK, Norway, Switzerland, and the EU.

ast year, I walked to a small village to meet a retired politician from South Sudan who was now living on his grandfather’s old farmland in Uganda as a refugee from the current civil wars. Ernest, who is a gentleman of just under seven feet tall and in his late seventies, explained to me his long involvement with the political organising of the Kakwa ethnic community, whose clans straddle the borders of Uganda, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in a three-way meeting point near where we were sitting.

We were discussing the mass flight from the civil wars of over one million South Sudanese people into Uganda over the last few years, and resulting questions of paperwork – including rights to settle, work, and belong – as part of a project I’ve been pursuing over the last two years with a fellow post-doctoral researcher, Dr Mohamed A. G. Bakhit, at the University of Khartoum in Sudan.

Many conversations in northern Uganda, in the refugee camps and in informal settlements outside, centred on these old questions of – as Ernest put it – ‘colonial baggage’: what borders really were here, why they existed, when they started, and how they divided people who felt they were family. As a conversation went between one of my research assistants (himself now a refugee) and a friend: Elias: ‘Even in Congo, there are some stones written in the name of South[ern] Sudan, but they are deep inside Congo, and the current Congo is just near the South Sudan border. Which means, people understand it was done by the British; with their own interest. But now, they have to respect the current border lines they are living in.’

John: ‘But which one – who created the new border line? Because if the stones are there, which are the marks – which reality counts now?’

Flags of the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan on a taxi dashboard at sunset, Koboko, Uganda

Sunken old barge – used to repatriate refugees in the 1970s – on the River Nile, Juba, South Sudan

Many members of these cross-border communities happily hold triple nationalities, with paperwork from various deceased and current regimes of all three countries.

But for other refugees who had fled longer distances, from deeper within South Sudan’s borders, their realities were different: with fewer personal connections, different languages, farming methods, and ways of building a temporary shelter, these families had less creative ideas of flexible borders and accessing ‘alternative’ nationality paperwork. Having fled often with only what they could carry, people brought a miscellany of paperwork with which to seek refugee status and new working lives: and with multiple names mis-spelt, written in the wrong order, or appropriated out of desperation from friends’ and relatives’ spare copies, people explained that they had become ‘aliases’ of their old selves.

I am interested as an historian in how these national borders and national identities are in formation – assisted by the UNHCR’s extensive paperwork, and by comparatively recent rebel and state powers in the three countries, independent in 1956, 1960, 1962, and for South Sudan, 2011. Borderland paperwork has only grown real for many people living in this neighbourhood since the armed rebels of 1980s and 1990s in Uganda and South Sudan began to demand tax, monitor movements, and hold elections. This new paperwork continues to evolve. For example, I was offered an official entry permit to cross the South Sudan border into a territory ‘held’ by its own new rebel movement (I politely declined). This is also the dubious paperwork people use to identify themselves; voting cards and membership papers of rebel parties prove a loyalty to a certain rough territory or idea of a country, even if (in the case of South Sudan) it was an imagined one.

Ernest recently used his miscellaneous local authority paperwork from the DRC to get a voting card for the Congo’s upcoming elections, despite never having claimed to be Congolese. He feels he lives close enough, with old family ties across the border, to have the right to a say.

European discussions of border policing, national belonging, and bio-metric identification feel sometimes distant in these contexts. But these residents of Uganda’s huge refugee communities are on the front lines of this border politics and the attendant question of what constitutes the nation-state today – conversations that we also need to keep developing on our side of the fence.

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Back to the Future Pat Aske reflects on her years as College Librarian

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am retiring from Pembroke College Library after sixteen years at the helm. Over these years the Library has been in a state of constant development, but this feels like a time of real change where the Library and Librarianship are at a crossroads. I mean this literally, too, as Pembroke is about to take the exciting step of advancing into Mill Lane, giving us lots of opportunities for change.

Google has digitised millions of books, so people often ask me if there is a future for the printed book. In addition, libraries in the public sector are disappearing at a fast rate, while academic libraries are losing their traditional status to become ‘information hubs’. What does all that mean for librarians? Are they becoming obsolete in a digital world?

Today’s College Librarian must be professionally qualified and have a strong interest in offering information skills training. Running a college library is not only a question of providing text books and maintaining a quiet space for work. A college librarian nowadays needs to be a mediator bridging the gap between students and the vast array of information at their fingertips.

My feeling is that there will continue to be a demand for printed text books for some years to come. As more e-resources become available I have noticed a very gradual reduction in the number of books requested and borrowed, but use of the library is increasing, not diminishing. In the academic year 2017-2018, students swiped in to the College Library through the electronic doors 67,416 times. The desire for a communal space and a quiet place to study is still there for the majority of students, while others prefer an ‘Information Commons’ where they are free to eat and drink, use their laptops, and talk. In the future, when Pembroke acquires more space in Mill Lane, we will be in a position to offer both, but the Waterhouse library, because of its architectural design, is ideal in having both a traditional interior space for individual study as well as some communal space.

A college librarian also plays another important role in being custodian of historic collections. In the past, archival work involved a rather closed world; scholars applied for appointments to examine particular editions of rare books for their research. Now, the emphasis is on opening up our special collections by making them as widely available as possible through online catalogues and public displays.

However, for bibliographical research, digital images are not always a substitute; some scholars still need to inspect the original book or manuscript.

Why don’t we digitise our rare books? That is another question I am often asked.

Digitisation is an expensive, highly specialised and time-consuming process. Thanks to the generosity of Pembroke alumni who paid for the photography, and to the experts who wrote the metadata which runs alongside the images, and to the staff at Cambridge University Library who put it all together, we now have three unique Pembroke manuscripts on the Cambridge Digital Library: The Album Amicorum, E. G. Browne’s Diaries, and Matthew Wren’s Benefactors’ Book: www.cudl.cam.ac.uk. At the same time, our medieval manuscripts are being expertly catalogued by Professor Rod Thomson (University of Tasmania), and we are doing project-based cataloguing of our extensive rare book collection, which is teaching us a lot about the provenance of our special collections.

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Conservation is another important part of the job. Two decades ago, Clive Trebilcock, then Fellow-Librarian, wanted to do a preservation survey of our rare book collection. His ambition was unfortunately not realised, as other tasks in the Library took precedence. During the past few years, though, we have had a team of trained volunteers from the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS) cleaning and repairing our rare books and noting down their condition. Finally, twenty years later, the job has been accomplished.

Looking back to 2002, when I came to Pembroke as Librarian, the library extension had just been added, we had a solitary computer catalogue with very short bibliographic records, and I had one part-time assistant.

Our library management system was basic and easy to use.

Our students were mainly undergraduates, with the addition of Californian and Japanese Summer School students in the long vac. We provided a service and a quiet haven to study in a welcoming environment. In the everchanging world of higher education we now have an equal number of undergraduates and postgraduates, our Summer School students come from all parts of the globe, and all have very different expectations. We have an excellent staff structure and a brand new cloud-based library management system. It’s a different world!

But what of the future? I mentioned we are at a crossroads. The library will continue to move forward and embrace change, but in the outside world things seem to be taking a step backwards – sales of printed books are increasing while e-books have slumped, typewriter sales are booming as people try to avoid the digital footprint left behind by emails, and everyone is more conscious of the need for data security. Throughout all the changes ahead I am sure the Library will continue to be at the heart of Pembroke College.

Patricia Aske, Librarian, joined the staff at Pembroke in September 2002. She will retire in September and is looking forward to having more time to spend in the UL as a reader, starting with James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Research Fellowship in Italian Studies Keith Sykes (1965) on the Research Fellowship that he established in Pembroke

T Keith Sykes read economics as an undergraduate at Pembroke, then worked in the City. Becoming an Actuary provided the ideal qualification for someone developing an interest in Italy, following a long vacation visit there while at Cambridge. Keith remains proud of the M.A.,F.I.A. after his name.

he Twelfth William Pitt Seminar last autumn talked about the importance of mindfulness (see Monica Wirz’s article on p. 11). In my experience, one of the best ways to attain a sense of wellbeing is to support and foster charitable activities. Seeing Ambrogio CamozziPistoja, the current Research Fellow in Italian Studies whom I support, sitting in front of me at the Seminar, I felt obliged to tap him on the shoulder and say thank you.

Indeed, I feel fortunate in enjoying a delightful second career.

Pembroke came alive to increasing financial pressures early; first support was found successfully in the sciences, with pharmaceutical companies particularly interested in accessing the intellectual resources of Cambridge University thorough Pembroke. The situation was not at all the same for the arts, so I decided that I would like to found a Research Fellowship. In an unguarded moment, when asked by an alumnus, ‘why Italian?’, I replied that it was an efforts to civilise Pembroke. The Senior Tutor was standing at my elbow and corrected this ‘to make Pembroke ever more civilised’, a judgement I would not dare contradict.

Some fifteen years ago we interviewed for the first Fellow. One of the Italian candidates indulged in psychological warfare, suggesting to the others that he was the preferred candidate because of his supposed connections. Even today Dr Claudia Bolgia, elected the first Fellow, admits that she did not treat the message to speak to the Senior Tutor with any urgency. She was keener on using the visit to Cambridge as a tourist, not thinking it possible that she would become resident. But rapidly she became an established member of the Pembroke Fellowship and community. Rooms in Orchard building made for integration, despite the familiar Italian lament of inadequate kitchen facilities ... a message to the architect of Dolby Court?

The Fellowship runs for five years, in contrast to the normal three years. Particularly for a newcomer to Cambridge, three years can too easily become a year to settle in, a year to do some research, and a year to find the next job. Even so there is a sense of sorrow when the incumbent moves on (in Claudia’s case to an established lecturer’s post at Edinburgh University).

The search for a new Fellow then commences, and Dr Kenneth Clarke was elected, from Trinity College, Dublin, by way of Bologna and Oxford. Through the luck of the draw he found rooms directly above the Senior Parlour and Thomas Grey Room. The bath had been replaced by a shower, so that an absent-minded resident could not flood the rooms below. Subsidiary responsibilities began to be added on, the most exacting being my return to live in Cambridge and the risk of the question ‘how is the research going today?’ Teaching was always a priority, I believed, for a research Fellow, preferably at both Univeresity and College (supervision) level. But the Fellow began to be encumbered with support for dinners, including the annual serata, an annual lecture, admission interviews. Study in the History of Art and the influence of the Italian greats, like Dante and Boccaccio on Chaucer and English literature to this day, seems to be an interdisciplinary feature of the Cambridge system.

Kenneth is now an established senior lecturer at York University in English and related literature. Dr Ambrogio Cammozzi-Pistoja was not only in Cambridge, but also in Pembroke, when elected to the Fellowship. He had just completed his PhD as a Gates scholar. With Tess, his wife whom he met in Cambridge, he represents the most local of holders. Early on he suggested I accept my most difficult role yet: to convince Tess that while his favoured name for their new daughter was Beatrice, this did not show an obsession with Dante. The task was way beyond my powers of persuasion.

Ambrogio has continued to develop the breadth of the appointment. The first to publish two books during his tenure, he has supported many other activities: from last year’s Formal Hall Italian dinner overseen by chef and restaurateur Antonio Carluccio, to the lecture delivered by the former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi. I hope that the Stop Press column will include details of Ambrogio’s next move.

The main sorrow of a Research Fellowship is the fixed term, so that, to make way for the next one, the term of the incumbent comes to an end. For the fourth time, a new Fellow has been elected. We await the arrival of Dr Jesscia Maratsos from the US in the autumn with enthusiasm. She is an Art Historian with a particular interest in Pontormo and Michelangelo. I stopped counting the number of applicants when it went over 130, but feel assured that we have a newcomer in the great tradition.

There is still much to be done. Newer concerns are to build the community based around Italian studies further.

Mutual support is so important, whether College or University based, and what more Italian way to do this than over a meal and a glass of (Italian) wine? Apart from being rigorous, I believe firmly that study should be fun.

Dr Claudia Bolgia

Dr Kenneth Clarke

Dr Ambrogio Cammozzi-Pistoja

Dr Jesscia Maratsos

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Pembroke Choir’s Tour to Zambia Anna Lapwood, Director of Music

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A Zambian musician learning how to write music for the first time

driving curfew – thereby thankfully escaping a night sleeping on the coach. On arrival in Lusaka, we discovered it was a very different place to Livingstone; Lusaka was a bustling city, throwing into sharper contrast the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

We spent a substantial period of time working with the children from the St Matthias Community School, located in the heart of Lusaka’s slums. The school provides education for orphans and vulnerable children between the ages of five to fourteen. Of the 230 students we worked with, 122 were double orphans, many of the students had been rescued from child marriages, and twenty-one of them were HIV positive.

The headteacher told us that the school could only afford to feed the children twice a week, and for many these were their only meals. Our visit to the school was an experience that I think will remain with us forever. The children sang to us and some of them stood up and told us their stories, explaining how they had been rescued from child marriages or abusive homes.

The whole choir came away emotionally drained, and decided to do something to help the school. We organised a fundraising concert, bringing together Pembroke Choir, the children of St Matthias school, and a local choir of young adults, raising over £800 to help expand the school. On returning home, one of the Choir members was so moved by the experience that in memory of his late father he decided to donate all the remaining funds that the school required.

Personally, I had a long conversation with a girl called Jessica, who took my phone number, about her aspirations to become a teacher. Despite not owning a phone, she regularly calls me whenever she has access to one, telling me how much she enjoys school.

Our experience at St Matthias was symptomatic of the trip as a whole; everywhere we went we were greeted by children who were curious, eager to learn, and exceedingly generous. The Choir is excited to be returning in 2020 to continue learning from the incredible people of Zambia.

‘I was taken aback by the sheer enthusiasm, energy, and innate musicality these individuals possessed. Their unabashed optimism, despite having far less in material possessions than us, left me humbled and moved by their infectious positivity. For me, these experiences affirmed the transcendental nature of music-making – in that it has the ability to unite and bring joy to all of us irrespective of race and creed.’

Nelson Lam – Bass

Members of the Choir being taught Zambian dances by students from St Matthias School

The Choir leading a workshop in Mukuni village

LNP Photography

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raditionally, Choir tours tend to follow a similar format. The Choir arrives in a country, sings some concerts, and then leaves. With Pembroke Choir’s tour to Zambia, we wanted to change that. Instead of concerts, the emphasis was placed on working with schools and communities, spreading the joy of music through workshops and group music-making.

Immediately on arrival in Zambia, we were given a taste of the incredible hospitality that awaited us throughout the trip; we were met at the airport by the Mothers’ Union, a group of over fifty women ranging in age from eighteen to eighty. We all somehow managed to cram onto a coach and began the drive to our hostel, with the Mothers’ Union singing to us throughout the journey. The coach also made the ideal location for our first encounter with a giant Zambian wasp.

The next day, the work began. One of our projects involved spending time in Mukuni village, teaching Western notation to a small group of young adults. Working out how to teach something that most of us take for granted was a fascinating experience; trying to explain that a dot after a note multiplies its value by 1.5 was made even more challenging than usual by the language barrier. However, it was worth it to see the amazing moment of realisation: what they had written down could translate into sound.

We had planned to perform a concert most evenings, but quickly discovered that our concert culture was entirely different to that found in Zambia. While rehearsing for our first concert, we were bemused by the large number of people arriving in traditional attire with musical instruments. A brief conversation with the priest revealed that they were there to join in. What was originally intended to be a ninety-minute concert became a three-hour musical party, with five choirs sharing their music. The audience expressed their enjoyment through ululating. Admittedly, the first time it happened in a moving rendition of ‘Deep River’, I was rather alarmed, and worried that one of the sopranos had been reacquainted with the giant Zambian wasp from earlier. However, once we got used to the sound we hoped to hear it in every performance.

By the end of the evening, all of the Choirs were up and dancing, learning each other’s songs and dances as we went along. Pembroke Choir came away happily exhausted, with their hearts full of music.

For the second half of the trip, we relocated to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital city. The journey to Lusaka was a hairraising eight-hour coach trip featuring just two toilet breaks, several hundred potholes and a minor police chase. We passed through the final checkpoint one minute before the night-time

Anna Lapwood is the Director of Music at Pembroke College, and a Trustee of the Muze Trust, a charity committed to providing music education to children from impoverished backgrounds in Zambia. Before moving to Cambridge, Anna studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where she was the Organ Scholar.

Is there a Role for Students in International Development?

Elizabeth O’Brien (2015) on the student-run Cambridge Development Initiative

I Elizabeth O’Brien, is a thirdyear Natural Sciences student and Director of CDI 2017/2018.

CDI email: director.uk@ cambridgedevelopment.org.

CDI website: www. cambridgedevelopment.org/

Photo of all the UK and Tanzanian volunteers in their CDI T-Shirts at Ardhi university campus where we were staying in summer 2017

n recent years, student volunteering has been under the scrutiny of the public eye. With increasing numbers of students wanting to volunteer abroad, the ‘voluntourism’ sector has grown into a billion-pound industry. Along with this expansion have come questions regarding the efficacity and ethics of the industry.

Volunteering aboard has continually been criticised for providing an opportunity to benefit western volunteers as opposed to impacting positively on communities. It has also been criticised for promulgating western authority and perpetuating white stereotypes. This negative attention has prompted some to ask: is there a role for students in international development? To this question my response is that there definitely is, and that Cambridge Development Initiative (CDI) is paving the way.

CDI is an entirely student-run international NGO that conducts collaborative sustainable development projects in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was set up in 2013 by a group of ambitious Cambridge students who were determined to use their time at Cambridge to do something genuinely impactful on the international stage. From the beginning, CDI has been centred around collaboration between UK and Tanzanian students taking a lead in project delivery.

Our partnerships are not restricted to student groups. CDI has worked with a variety of local actors and organisations – ranging from small NGOs and community groups to the Tanzanian government – to ensure the sustainability of our collaborative work. All of our projects are communityfocused and developed through a process of human-centred design; generating creative solutions to local problems.

Through these fundamental values, CDI aims to defy the voluntourism stereotype and demonstrate the value that students can bring to international development. We are changing the way that student volunteering is done.

partnership. It should allow for greater independence on the Tanzanian side, ensuring sustainability of joint projects and will allow the Tanzanian team the independence to grow.

Local partners have also been crucial for the handover of our entrepreneurship project. Being a student-run volunteer organisation, we are aware of the limitations of our short summer implementation period. Consequently, CDI is always looking at potential partners that would be best placed to take a successful small-scale project forward.

Last summer we were able to realise this aim for our entrepreneurship project, which consisted of an eight-week programme that equipped participants with the means to launch their own social enterprises. This project has proven successful in previous years; with over 100 individuals having participated with many of the teams that ended up being awarded investment or entering into incubation programmes. With this proven track record, we were able to bring together three local organisations who have taken on the implementation and funding of this course for the years to come. This will allow greater sustainability and the prospect of scaling up.

Being student-led does come with its challenges. One already discussed is the limited two-month implementation period available. Another is the lack of expertise which can prove a challenge in technical based work. With few of us having work experience outside of the UK, working in an international setting can be intimidating. There is also the struggle of time management, as CDI responsibilities are balanced against a full-time degree. These challenges come with the territory and, although frustrating at times, they have done little to stifle the positive impact that CDI has had through its work.

In the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene sector CDI has introduced simplified sewerage technology to East Africa and provided sustainable sanitation to over 450 community members in informal settlements. We are now looking at pioneering the world’s first integrated simplified sewerage and biogas network that will use unwanted waste to generate a burnable fuel that can be distributed back to the community. In addition to our work in entrepreneurship, CDI has also made a real difference in education. We have worked with a local NGO ‘Bridge for Change’ to provide over 1200 students with career support. In summer 2017 we also had over seventy students take part in our entrepreneurial ‘Think Big Challenge’, with many showcasing at our Dream Sharing Event. CDI has also provided over 250 UK and Tanzanian volunteers with an opportunity to take initiative and make a real difference.

CDI represents the new wave of student volunteering, and it has been pleasing to see other organisations based on the CDI model starting to spring up. I hope that the impact CDI has been able to achieve has helped to dispel misconceptions and demonstrate that there is a valuable place for students within international development.

So how do we turn these aims and values into practice and real impact? An example of CDI’s belief in equal partnership is the recent establishment of a separate Tanzanian local NGO under the name ‘Kite Dar es Salaam’.

Although we have always worked collaboratively with Tanzanian students, until September 2017 it has always been under the collective umbrella of CDI. This change to CDI’s internal structure aims to push to a truly equal

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Forty Years of International Programmes at Pembroke College Daniela Passolt, Director of International Programmes

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ot long ago Sir Roger Tomkys, former Master of Pembroke, asked me – with his characteristic inscrutable smile – why we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of International Programmes in 2017, as he could not recall any previous celebrations. My reply was: because of a serious clear-out of the storerooms in our Department! In box after box we discovered a remarkable archive of documents, photos, all sorts of correspondence (including handwritten notes) and Japanese souvenirs, reaching back over decades. For anyone more closely acquainted with International Programmes, these were real treasure boxes, making it difficult to stop after one started to sift through them. Some of the photos, for instance, were particularly striking: one of the earliest, from 1977, shows a group of summer school students from the University of California, which must have been highly unusual for Pembroke at the time considering that the Californian contingent included female students and Pembroke had not yet admitted women.

Looking through all this material, and realising how well timed our ‘rediscovery’ was since International Programmes was just about to enter its fortieth year of existence, it occurred to us that these witnesses of history represented us with a chance to step back and reflect on the many generations of international students that have come to study at Pembroke (in the region of 20,000?), what their experience has meant to them and how it had shaped their future paths.

To mark the fortieth anniversary we organised an interview series spanning over twelve months with past students and key individuals closely associated with the development of International Programmes. We also held a celebratory dinner with a small exhibition and with personal reflections interspersed during the dinner.

Celebrating forty years of International Programmes has meant not only revisiting our history but also thinking about future generations of students. We are currently working on the launch of a crowdfunding campaign for a Fortieth Anniversary Prize to fund three annual scholarships with the intention of putting past, present, and future students in touch with one another and establishing an enduring memory of their experiences and thoughts about their time at Pembroke.

Pembroke has welcomed large numbers of short-term international students for such a long time that it is easy to forget how unusual it still is to have this type of year-round operation and on this scale – every year International Programmes has more than the combined number of undergraduate and graduate students in the College – and that Pembroke started this considerable enterprise much earlier than almost all other Colleges. In that respect, Pembroke has been an avant-garde!

From the outset, two institutional links, namely with Nihon University and the University of California, have been defining and shaping Pembroke’s approach to developing vacation programmes. Although the centrality of these links is receding, much of the initial framework that was established to cater for their specific institutional requirements is today still palpable in the Japanese vacation

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programmes and in the Pembroke-King’s summer programme. While all programmes aim at distilling the essence of a Cambridge undergraduate education, the semester programmes, established considerably later, allow students to experience Cambridge as fully matriculated students during the academic year.

Transformation has been a hallmark of International Programmes since its beginnings. In the immediate future we will transform the Pembroke-King’s Programme this summer from an eight-week to a six-week programme and we will launch the first Fall Semester programme in autumn. In the longer term, the Department and the College will need to think about how to respond to an incredibly dynamic and fastchanging study abroad environment, part of international education, as there is now an intense competition for students not just in the UK but worldwide. At the moment, for example, one major question for us is how to reach international students in the age of information (and opportunity) overload and social media. More profoundly, the current environment poses the challenging task of balancing the need to continuously adapt and adjust to cater for changing and highly individual student needs and expectations (this is the online shopping basket generation!) while at the same time maintaining our identity and reputation and the core educational values the College stands for.

For decades, International Programmes has made an important and much-needed financial contribution to the College, funding some of Pembroke’s principal educational and other activities. Beyond that, I believe that educating students from all over the world has not been a one-way street; rather, it has left a long-lasting mark on Pembroke itself, playing a part in shaping the College’s self-conception as an outward-looking and open-minded higher education institution which embraces international research and education.

Daniela Passolt took up her position of Director of International Programmes in 2016 after she joined the Department in 2008 as Deputy Director. Previously, she completed her PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics where she also worked as Research Officer on regional security cooperation.

The 1977 summer school students from California

The ‘Productivity Paradox’: Are We too Busy to Get Anything Done?

Monica Wirz (2009) on the Twelfth William Pitt Seminar

With nearly thirty years of corporate experience in an international setting, Dr Monica Wirz (2009) has become increasingly interested in the wider social role of organisations and leadership.

Her belief in the importance of cross-fertilisation between theory and practice has led her to a career combining academic research and management. Dr Wirz has edited the book Excellence in Diversity: Values and Visions of Pembroke College, Cambridge since 1984, which was written to mark the thirty-year anniversary of women’s admissions to Pembroke.

The ‘productivity paradox’ is not a new issue. In fact, the term was first used to refer to a slowdown in labour productivity in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, against a hundredfold increase in computing capacity in the same period. A few decades on, as we navigate through the fourth Industrial Revolution and all the advances it brings with the Internet and the Cloud, cognitive computing and cyberphysical systems, we are confronted with the same problem: technological advances have neither fully delivered on the promise of more leisure time for individuals nor on gains in productivity for firms and economies. Are we really so busy that we cannot get anything done? Or perhaps too distracted by our mobiles and social media? Could the expectation of continual presence at work (physical or virtual) – and the consequent blurring of professional and personal time boundaries – be backfiring?

In October 2017 The Twelfth William Pitt Seminar, organised by Pembroke’s Corporate Partnership Programme, aimed to discuss such questions. Four speakers presented different perspectives on this topic: Dr Bill Janeway (1965) opened the seminar providing a macro-economic overview; Dr David Cleevely – representing the perspective of businesses – advocated for automation and operational efficiencies to improve productivity; Professor Barbara Sahakian and Michael Chaskalson approached the topic from the level of the individual, discussing respectively how neuropsychology research can help improve brain function/effectiveness and how mindfulness in the workplace can boost productivity. The panel shared the premise that increasing productivity – defined as a measure of the efficiency of converting inputs (labour, material, capital, resources, etc.) into outputs – is a worthwhile and desirable goal. As such, they were generally in agreement with the views of most nations and supranational institutions, such as the IMF and OECD. In the UK, for example, productivity merited a w h o l e

chapter in HM Treasury’s Autumn Budget 2017, which states that raising productivity is ‘vital to building an economy fit for the future’. Throughout history, improvements in productivity and the automation of production processes have indeed enhanced human lives by raising standards of living for greater numbers of people. But is this the full picture?

True to tradition, Pembroke’s audience at this seminar was as stimulating as the talks themselves. The debate which followed the presentations were challenging and thoughtprovoking, questioning the limits of productivity growth and the quest for efficiency as aims with incontestable value. Let us take as a scenario one of the questions posed: if you were to find oneself an in-patient at a hospital, would your needs be fully met simply through the provision of a hyper-efficient and productive service? As things stand, productivity metrics struggle to factor in non-quantifiables aspects of care such as the emotions of sympathy, kindness, and warmth. Yet the latter are intrinsic to a person’s ability to care for others in situations of vulnerability. Moreover, maintaining patients’ emotional and mental wellbeing can aid their physical recovery. In this scenario, then, productivity growth is desirable to increase the efficiency of caring for patients, but it does not address their needs, or those of their families, more generally.

A critique of productivity is thus as relevant today as when we analyse the actions of the Luddites during the first Industrial Revolution. Rather than being simply reactionary, the Luddites’ protests aimed at ensuring acceptable work conditions and environments. Similarly, the wider appraisal of most countries’ underlying political-economic philosophies (often pejoratively called ‘productivism’ or ‘growthism’) questions the primacy of work and economic growth in human society. Feminist economists make the point that although both production (of goods and services) and social reproduction (of activities that enable and sustain human labour) are part of an integrated process, mainstream economic indicators nevertheless fail to account for the latter.

Both economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen (Trinity College) and sociologist Anthony Giddens (King’s College) have echoed that criticism and called for a rebalancing of life domains so human capital may be developed not just in terms of the economic sphere.

Counter-intuitive as that might seem, a sideways move might not only help to address some elements of ‘distraction’ at work, but also be exactly what the economy will benefit from over the next chapters of productivity growth. As artificial intelligence (AI) automates repetitive and processoriented tasks, high-skilled labour will be required for jobs which demand high-reasoning, critical thinking, creativity and innovation to deal with complex cross-functional reasoning problems. This isn’t just an issue for productive economy; the society of the future will depend on fully-rounded human beings!

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Only Connect…

Sally March, Development Officer

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ne of my favourite tasks in Lent Term is interviewing the first years who apply for the 1347 Committee, one of the College’s groups of student ambassadors. The Freshers often look slightly bemused when I tell them that by signing the matriculation book they become a member of Pembroke for the rest of their life. To someone in their first year, only a few months into their degree, the idea that they are part of a membership of souls that stretches across the decades, around six continents, reaching back through seven centuries stops them in their tracks.

Unconsciously, they are already aware of what it means to be a Valencian. If you ask them what their impressions are of Pembroke after a term and a half, the adjectives frequently used are: friendly, welcoming, communityspirited. This also applies to the members of Pembroke’s non-resident alumni community.

However, until now it has often been far from straightforward for Pembroke Members to make contact with each other easily. Because data protection and privacy are such important considerations for the College, Pembroke Members either need to check online whether that individual has set up an ‘Email for Life’ address, or ask someone in the Development team to forward on a message or letter.

So, to help our 9,000 contactable alumni connect more easily with each other, we recently launched a Pembroke Online Community. This runs on a platform called ‘Fabrik’, which was built by Cambridge graduates (regrettably from Queens’!). (For more about Fabrik, please visit: www.fabrikgroups.com) This Pembroke Online Community helps Members to:

I would, in particular, urge Members to become part of, or create, online groups, which can be based on subject, sports club or College society, geography, matriculation, job sector or other interest.

Rather than the College just talking to you, we want your Pembroke alumni experience to be all the more interactive and collaborative. Also, if you have any thoughts or comments, I would be interested to hear them. The site will continue to evolve, and we will work closely with Fabrik to develop the functionality and experience, but it’s pretty good to start with!

• Find contemporaries with whom they have lost touch, and/or make new connections across the Pembroke generations;

On 25 May 2018 a new EU data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), comes into force. It will harmonise the control and processing of personal data and strengthen the rights an individual has over their own data. The College and the University have been actively preparing for the introduction of GDPR, tightening up our procedures where necessary.

Pembroke takes the security of your data very seriously and it has introduced a new data protection statement specifically for alumni and other supporters of the College. You can find a copy of the statement on the College’s website at: www.pem.cam.ac.uk/alumni-development/dpo-alum/.

• Keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the College, such as forthcoming alumni events, and; • Help their careers or give back by providing an opportunity to network, to post job vacancies and internships, and create industry and interest groups and events.

All Pembroke Members who have an email address in their College database record should recently have received an invitation from communications@pem.cam.ac.uk to join this Community. If you think you haven’t received one (and it is worth double-checking your spam and promotions folders first!), please email me at: communications@pem.cam.ac.uk or call me on +44 (0)1223 765526.

To join, all you need to do is click on the link in that email message and follow the instructions asking you to create a log-on identity or log in via LinkedIn. The entire process should take no more than thirty seconds.

The more people who join, the larger the community, and the more useful the site will become for everyone, so please sign up! Nearly 30% of Valencians have already done so.

The Pembroke Online Community does not attempt to mimic the level and style of functionality offered by LinkedIn or Facebook. It is a secure and (we trust) easily understandable platform for Pembroke Members to interact with each other, whether for personal or work reasons.

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Other ways to keep in touch with what’s happening at Pembroke As well as the Martlet, the Gazette, the website and the Master’s termly emails, Pembroke Members can find news from the College, wherever they are in the world, via our Facebook (facebook.com/Pembroke1347), Twitter (@Pembroke1347) and Instagram (@Pembroke1347) channels.

We are also looking for alumni who can act as Digital Campaign Ambassadors, sharing College news and campaign posts on social media, helping to promote crowdfunding campaigns, and mentoring students running crowdfunding campaigns. If you’d like to learn more about this, email: communications@pem.cam.ac.uk.

GDPR – how Pembroke uses your data

Sally March joined Pembroke's Development Office in August 2001.

Poet’s Corner WINTER SOLSTICE IN THIRTY LINES

Dr Todd Swift is the director of indie press Eyewear Publishing. He has been a Poet-inResidence / Visiting Scholar in Pembroke for this academic year. His most recent collection of poems (his tenth) is Dreambeauty-psycho (2017). When not in Cambridge he lives in Maida Vale, London, with his wife Sara.

I have no basis, scientific or political, For making claims in language, Even less religious permission to do so, Though the Pope has redefined hell Lately as simply the soul’s disappearance, Which is a comforting diminishment Of infinite terror in an endless theo-geographical domain, Since what goes away can return, As we know reading theory or plays with doors.

And who says lyric expression requires Any sanction from authority if a revolution?

Statements in this form are their own facts, Linking uttered imagination to discovery.

To proceed: the solstice intrigues me; The point of greatest loss a point at which increase begins; The dying of a glimmer; the fade that cuts Abruptly to the tomb. In the buried ground Not much illumination lies around; the sun Is forgotten, the worms begin their humour, Their party of sick jokes, the guffaw of rot.

The plot in this cycle is a swing from closer Planetary alignment, to a less bright position In the cosmos. Or, less elliptically, the solar System has an eccentric shape, belying claims All is perfected – the oval proves the circle false.

The utter abjection of the pit into which The disappeared light is thrown today, too early, Is a happy act, in that soon, incandescence will Burst the dark dam, huskily crashed open, Like a bull of light advancing on darkly twisting toreadors.

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